New Journal on Asian and Asian American Studies Seeks Submissions for Inaugural Issues

Verge: Studies in Global Asias is a new journal that includes
scholarship from scholars in both Asian and Asian American Studies. These two fields have traditionally defined themselves in opposition to
one another, with the former focused on an area-studies, nationally and
politically oriented approach, and the latter emphasizing
epistemological categories, including ethnicity and citizenship, that
drew mainly on the history of the United States. The past decade
however has seen a series of rapprochements in which, for instance,
categories "belonging” to Asian American Studies (ethnicity, race,
diaspora) have been applied with increasing success to studies of Asia.
For example Asian Studies has responded to the postnational turn in the
humanities and social sciences by becoming increasingly open to
rethinking its national and regional insularities, and to work that
pushes, often literally, on the boundaries of Asia as both a place and a
concept. At the same time, Asian American Studies has become
increasingly aware of the ongoing importance of Asia to the Asian
American experience, and thus more open to work that is transnational or
multilingual, as well as to forms of scholarship that challenge the
US-centrism of concepts governing the Asian diaspora.

Verge
showcases scholarship on "Asian” topics from across the humanities and
humanistic social sciences, while recognizing that the changing scope of
"Asia” as a concept and method is today an object of vital critical
concern. Deeply transnational and transhistorical in scope, Verge
emphasizes thematic and conceptual links among the disciplines and
regional/area studies formations that address Asia in a variety of
particularist (national, subnational, individual) and generalist
(national, regional, global) modes. Responding to the ways in which
large-scale social, cultural, and economic concepts like the world, the
globe, or the universal (not to mention East Asian cousins like tianxia
or datong) are reshaping the ways we think about the present, the past
and the future, the journal publishes scholarship that occupies and
enlarges the proximities among disciplinary and historical fields, from
the ancient to the modern periods. The journal emphasizes
multidisciplinary engagement—a crossing and dialogue of the disciplines
that does not erase disciplinary differences, but uses them to make
possible new conversations and new models of critical thought.

Issue 1: OPEN ISSUEThe
history of scholarship on Asian America, when juxtaposed with the
fields of Asian Studies, reminds us how much nations, national
movements, and other forms of national development continue to exert
powerful effects on the world in which we live. Such movements also
remind us of the importance of inter-nationalism, of the kinds of
networks that can spring up between states and which can work to disrupt
the smooth passage of the planet into a utopian post-national future.
The growing interest in the global and the transnational across
disciplines thus brings the various Asia-oriented fields and
disciplines—history and literature, Asia and Asian America, East and
South, modern and premodern—closer together. This inaugural issue seeks
to feature work that illustrates the diverse engagements across
disciplines (literature, history, sociology, art history, political
science, geography) and fields (Asian Studies and Asian American
Studies) that are possible once we begin thinking about the possible
convergences and divergences such divisions have traditionally
represented. We welcome a range of perspectives; featured contributors
include Dean Chan, Alexandra Chang, Catherine Asher, Catherine Ceniza
Choy, Magnus Fiskesjö, Pamela Kyle Crossley, Evelyn Hu-Dehart, Stephanie
DeBoer, Martin Svensson Ekstrom, Pika Ghosh, Yunte Huang, Suk-young
Kim, Joachim Kurtz, Meera Lee, Wei Li, Colleen Lye,Tak-wing Ngo, Haun
Saussy, David Palumbo-Liu, Sheldon Pollack, Eleanor Ty, and Jeffrey
Wasserstrom.

Submission deadline: February 1, 2014

Issue 2: COLLECTING (edited by Jonathan Abel and Charlotte Eubanks)As
a construct and product of powerful institutions from empires, to
nation-states, museums, to universities, Asia has long been formulated
at the level of the collection. Whether through royal court poetry
compilations, colonial treasure hunters, art historians, bric a brac
shop keepers, or librarians of rare archives, the role of collecting and
classification has been deeply connected not only to definitions of
what counts as Asia and who can be considered Asian, but also to how
Asia continues to be configured and re-configured today.

With
this in mind, this special issue of Verge seeks to collect papers on the
history, finance, psychology, politics and aesthetics of collecting
Asia in Asia and beyond. This collection hopes not only to bring into
relief how "Asia” has been created but also to promote new definitions
of Asia. What, for instance, are the historical implications of
government-sponsored poetry anthologies in Mughal India, Heian-era
Japan, or 20th century North Korea? What do the contents of
treasure-houses—at Angkor Wat, Yasukuni Shrine, or Vishwanath—tell
us about evolving concepts of art and of the elasticity of cultural and
national contours? When did Japan become a geographical base for the
collection of Asia? Who collects Chinese books? How has Indian art been
defined by curatorial practices? Why did South Korea begin to collect
oral histories in the 1990s? What politics lie behind the exhibition of
mainland Chinese posters in Taiwan? How much money do cultural
foundations spend on maintaining collections? Where are the limits of
Asian collections in geographical and diasporic terms? How do
constructions of these collections impact our views of the collective,
whether of Tibetan exiles in Dharamsala, Japanese internment camps in
Indonesia, global Chinatowns, or adherents of new Asian religions in the
Americas and former Soviet Republics?

This issue is interested
in the various cultures of collecting Asia and collecting Asians, in the
many politics of collecting, in the odd financial restrictions on
collectors, in the psychology of collecting, in the anthropology of how
communities form around collected objects, and in the sociology around
collective histories.

Submission deadline: August 1, 2014

Issue 3: ASIAN URBANISMS AND URBANIZATIONS (edited by Madhuri Desai and Shuang Shen)In
the contemporary age of globalization, the city has gained new
importance and attention as a center of information industry, a node of
transnational and translocal networks, and a significant site of
capital, labor migration and culture (Saskia Sassen, Manuel Castells and
David Harvey). While this renewed interest in the city both perpetuates
and revises theories of the city as a metaphor of modernity (Walter
Benjamin, Georg Simmel), it also opens up questions regarding the
uniqueness and relevance of earlier cities and their experience of
urbanization. When we move us away from Eurocentric understandings of
modernity and time, it becomes increasingly possible to study
non-European urbanisms in the past and at present with theoretical rigor
and historical specificity. For this special issue, we invite
submissions (around 8000 words) that explore urbanism as a site of
comparison and connection among various Asian locales and beyond. We are
interested in not just studies of Asian cities and their urban
experience but also how "Asia” has been imagined both historically and
contemporaneously, through urbanism and urbanization, and how "Asia” as a
term of travel is registered in the urban space. This special issue
will draw attention to the following questions: As cities become
increasingly connected and similar to each other, how do they express
their distinct identities as well as articulate their unique histories?
Besides circulation, movement, and networks that have been much
emphasized in contemporary studies of the city, how do borders,
checkpoints, and passwords function in urban contexts? How does the city
articulate connections between the local, the national, and the
transnational? How does the Asian experience of urbanization and ideas
surrounding Asian urbanism revise, rethink, and in some cases revive
Asia’s colonial past? What does the Western perspective on some Asian
cities as unprecedented and futuristic tells us about the imagination of
Asia in the global context? How do migrant and ethnic communities
negotiate with and redefine the public space of the city? How is the
urban public shared or fragmented by co-existing ethnic and religious
communities? How is the rising cosmopolitanism of these cities
challenged through migration and sharply defined ethnic and religious
identities? We invite submissions that address these questions within
the context of Early modern, colonial and contemporary urbanisms and
urbanizations.

The
nature of Asian empires in the past, as well as the definition of
imperialism in contemporary times, is a topic of ongoing discussion
among scholars from a wide range of fields. In this special issue of
Verge, we will explore a cluster of issues concerning the mechanics and
influence of empires, imperial authority, and imperial types of
influence over indigenous cultures and frontiers in Asia, as well as
their diasporas abroad and in the USA. We invite submissions that
address one or some of the following questions: How did various imperial
efforts interact with local concerns to shape the history of
cross-cultural interactions in this region? How did imperial regimes
propose to solve the issue of a multi-ethnic empire? What were the roles
of specific geographic and economic spheres in Asia (such as those of
nomadic, agricultural, maritime, high altitude or lowland, and
far-flung/diasporic cultures) in contributing to the distinctive quality
of certain empires? How do certain characteristics of imperial
administration and control in Asia compare to those of imperial states
in other regions of the world? In addition to questions concerning the
long history of Asian imperialism and comparisons with other empires, we
also solicit submissions that speak to questions concerning
contemporary Asian diasporas and their reactions to various forms of
imperialism in the modern age. Questions might address such topics as
"Yellow Peril” fears about Asian cultural imperialism; Japanese
internment camps as a US response to Japanese imperial expansion in the
Pacific; the Tibetan diaspora in South Asia and the Americas as a
reaction to contemporary Chinese imperialism; Vietnamese responses to
French, Chinese, or American imperialisms, and the treatment of
Japanese-Americans in Hawaii in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor.